Thursday, 12 June 2014

DCC Campaign Update

In this weekend's adventure, the PC party came to the conclusion that:

-The village of outcasts under the Azure Tower was a fairly good place to spend a gap year.

-Unicorns are actually assholes; especially Lightning Unicorns.

-The Red Mutants don't mess around.

-The fundamental curse of the Brassiere of Femininity is that the clasp is really really difficult to get off.

-The Azure Order's Transmutation Lab facilities are second-to-none.

-It was a tough year to be a Cleric back in Arkhome.

-If you're a cleric who gets tortured by people everywhere you go, after a while you just start to assume its going to happen.

-The Eye Tyrants must be stopped.

-Only Grenoble the Pious, the greatest Cleric who ever lived, might be able to stop them. Unfortunately he's lost somewhere in the outer dimensions, and would first need to be found, and possibly rescued, before he can call down divine aid against the Eye Tyrants.

-To do this, the team would need to find Anthraz the Destroyer, the greatest adventurer of all time, according to his reputation.

-Red Mutants may not mess around, but they're also definitely not fireproof.

-The Orc Hills are conspicuously absent of Orcs; it remains to be seen whether the Limitless Mountains have any limits.

-When you're facing down 90 Black Mutant Dervishes, its time to call for Divine Aid.

-When that Divine Aid takes the form of a Hologram of Anthraz, it means he probably does live up to his reputation.

-When Tiamat, who usually promises her faithful she'll send a dragon to help, makes it explicitly clear she will not be sending any dragons, that makes you pay attention.

-Even if your campaign-long wish is to grow dragon-wings, doing it when you're about to meet the human who single-handedly slaughtered more dragons in his life than you've eaten cheetohs is probably the worst possible time.

-No matter how much you might want to own Caliburn, the deadliest magical sword in the world; or a suit of Quantum Knight Plate Armor; its probably not worth having to fight the guy who won them in the first place, no matter how wizened and decrepit he might appear.

-Nor would it seem a good idea to try to steal some of his loot and run for it when he can casually dig out and freely give away a trapped Ifrit with a teleportation boon from under the nearest pile of huge diamonds.

-Anthraz sounds a little like Grandpa Simpson, if he was crossed with Dirty Harry.

-These days, Anthraz is mostly interested in playing checkers.

-When you hit level 10, there's really not much left to motivate you to go adventuring.

-While he fought back the Lord of the Dark Ones, murdered the Evil Dolphin King, defeated the Cult of Skaros, and wrestled a really large crocodile, Anthraz's greatest accomplishment may be his ability to spot a Brassiere of Femininity from a mile away.

-The temptation to have one last checkers match with his last surviving party-mate is almost enough to convince Anthraz to seek out Grenoble, but only if the PCs will first complete a quest to prove they aren't just "a bunch of dumb kids".

-If they have to fulfill a quest to satisfy Anthraz, the ultimate choice for the PCs is that while it might be easiest to slay the Peaceloving Dragon of Corannion Pass, the cost in terms of PC-dragon relations would be too high; and while stealing the Magic Wafer from the Cyborg Grandmother's Death Fortress is tempting, they already know that high-tech traps are extra-deadly. Thus, the wisest quest to embark upon will be to burn down the Bungalow of the Beach Giant Chiefs.

-When you're a Red Mutant who was charmed by someone with a Brassiere of Femininity, only to later encounter your charmer sans bra, everything you know about your life suddenly comes into question.

And the quote of the night? "DCC sure has taught us a lot about tolerance!"There's a string of words that might never have been heard in that particular sequence before.

For the record, since some people have apparently been under the impression that the order of gender-variant wizards might be an insulting sort of mockery that's going on; its actually not. Yes, there's some funny elements to the Azure Order; if you haven't guessed already this is a campaign that is poking a bit of fun at everything. However, the humor has never been at the expense of either gender identity or sexual orientation. And in fact, the Azure Order are, thus far in the campaign, the only large-scale group that have been depicted as both: a) unquestionably the good guys (their mission being to protect the weak and outcasts and oppose evil in all its forms)ANDb) at the same time actually both competent and powerful. There's a reason the PCs have taken to hanging out with them; from what they've seen so far of a shitty post-apocalyptic fantasy world, the Azure Order are a shining light, even if things occasionally get a little "Portlandia" with them.